In moments of private truth telling, I admitted this relationship might be doomed. Only, if I wasn’t with him, I thought I would die. He, Shiva, and Uma were the only beings who knew how much I hurt. They had stood by me during the worst of everything. Greg had forgiven me years ago for sleeping with another man when I felt like nothing mattered anymore. Surely I could forgive him for drowning his pain in alcohol, even if it felt like I was drowning with him. I no longer wanted to be a quitter. I felt like I owed him. Greg had, after all, saved me from Lowell, Fox, Thomas, and all the rest.
For all his size and bravado, Greg was a quiet, gentle man at heart. His drunken, combat-colored rants terrified me, but I felt I had no other path forward but through his suffering and mine. We contained our hurt within a giant, safe bubble. It bonded us, something no one else back home would ever understand.
He eventually stopped trying to touch me. I eventually stopped trying to make him feel better. We pushed our feelings so far down I couldn’t remember what anything erotic felt like anymore. Our relationship became strictly platonic. He finally pronounced that he didn’t need sex. He loved me. He would never leave me. It was a grandiose, foolish thing to say. But we both embraced the idea. The Desi part of me that had been raised to believe a partnership was simply an arrangement between two adults rose to the occasion. It felt like my duty. If this was some sad excuse for not having any say in the direction my life was taking, I was not ready to face that possibility.
We were fiercely loyal. I would have his back, as he had always had mine, even if I couldn’t share all parts of myself with him or with anyone else. I would make up for all my mistakes with other men by ensuring I never disappointed this man. He would be my family. I would make sure of it, my doubts be damned.
* * *
I. Later on, with the help of pro bono attorneys and colleagues, I learned more: the military also destroyed rape kits.
CHAPTER 11
Rising Up
Four years out of the Marines, I sat down with my parents over dinner and announced to them that I was going to become a yoga teacher. In the Corps, I had discovered that yoga was a vehicle for healing, and I wanted to experience more.
“You want to do this as a career?” my mother asked, horrified.
“No, Mom, not everything has to be a career.”
My mother was still frustrated that she could not explain to our Indian relatives what I did for a living. The military had been hard enough to sell to them. While Mom wrestled with the cost-benefit analysis of my decision, my father muttered to himself, with a scowl across his jaw and deep lines of judgment on his forehead.
My parents may have been Indian, but yoga was not on their list of approved activities. Spirituality was the realm of charlatans and quacks. My parents were not impressed with the white hippies who’d been taken in over the last century by enterprising Indian men in orange robes. Still, everything was relative, and Mom and Dad did the math. I wouldn’t be firing any weapons standing on my head.
I had selected Integral Yoga teacher training in part because it seemed to be everything the Marine Corps was not: gentle and ego-free. Its founder, Swami Satchidananda, was one of the first Indian gurus to bring yoga to the West, even opening the Woodstock festival. The training took place in Bacalar, a tiny town in southern Mexico. I met my head yoga instructor, Ramananda, a midwestern swami in his fifties, as I was getting out of the lake one morning and he was getting in. Standing on the dock with a beach ball in his hands, he wore orange shorts, orange flip-flops, and an orange towel. He was all white skin and bones, with twinkling blue eyes.
This was not the time or place for me to meet a monk. I was sopping wet, desperately trying to hide my boobs in my bathing suit and make my body small. Hyperconscious of my Indian upbringing, I think I called him Sir, or swami-ji, might have half bowed, clumsily put my palms together in respect while clutching a towel to my torso. I was horrified to meet Ramananda in my Speedo, but he was about as interested in my curves as I was in his protruding ribs. He was too busy splashing around in the water.
For one month, I rose at dawn with a bunch of strangers, a cast of twenty- to fifty-year-old white folks, a young woman from Singapore, and an older man from Iran. We meditated, did deep breathing, learned a bunch of asanas,I and ate healthy, nutritious vegetarian food. Our yoga training had the disciplined feel of Marine Corps training, with none of the abuse. Renouncing meat, alcohol, sex, privacy, and sleeping in were lessons in honing the mind and purifying the heart. Kindness was rooted in the philosophy of not harming oneself or others.II And compassion seemed to be the focus, not just some random side effect.
The bags under my eyes started to disappear. The feeling of wanting to tear people down for looking at me the wrong way was still there, but seemed less potent. People actually cared whether or not I was in pain. And the pain, sensing that it finally had a place to express itself and would no longer be stuffed down, was everywhere. On some days I needed to lie down, because my back couldn’t handle sitting upright on the floor for so many hours. My instructors let me, while I let the ground soak up my hurt. I cursed my Marine injuries for holding me back. I did not realize I was actually being encouraged forward.
My roommate, Jen, was a curly haired triathlete and former police officer who was struggling with a debilitating autoimmune disorder. Ever the optimist, she approached the disease like a benevolent storm trooper, transforming herself from hard-core carnivore into a raw vegan enthusiast and training for an Ironman race during breaks in our rigorous yoga schedule. She reminded me of an overzealous Marine, and in the beginning her presence was a constant reminder of everything I was trying to leave behind.
As my clenched fists softened, I came to consider that Jen was my mirror. There were many moments when she would sense me struggle, watch me suffer in my own body, with my broken knees and heavy heart, and accept me, with irritating cheerfulness.
The swami and his surf-the-waves sensibility regularly intercepted my self-hating habits. Eventually I stopped thinking of him as a white guy in an orange robe. One day, as I was steeped in negative thinking, he looked at me with kind, laughing eyes.
“You know, you are not your thoughts.”
Dude, you have got to be nuts, I heard myself thinking. If I wasn’t my thoughts, then who the heck was I?
One evening, my physical pain was more than I could take, so I booked a massage with Melina, the woman who ran our facility. Allowing a stranger to put her hands on me was a big deal. As she pulled the towel down slightly below my shoulders, she saw the Marine tattoo I’d gotten after 9/11.
“That’s impressive.”
Here it was. A conversation I didn’t want to have.
“Thanks.”
She dug into my thighs, where two decades’ worth of protective instincts had found a home.
“I kind of wish it weren’t there sometimes. It’s not me anymore.”
Melina paused, then asked, “Have you ever thought about integrating the experience instead of trying to get rid of it?”
I could feel myself resisting but had no desire to argue. Why would I integrate sadness and shame into my life? I could barely tolerate even remembering.
As we approached graduation day, our yoga instructors had arranged a sweat lodge for us with Melina and her shaman husband. They were both indigenous to Mexico, which gave the sweat lodge a feeling of authenticity. Up north, sweat lodges were often conducted by white folks who had no real connection to tribal peoples or practices, and it made my head spin. I was not feeling settled about a bunch of gringos engaging in Native spiritual practices. But in the end, I joined. If I had opened my mouth at every culturally appropriated moment, I would never have left home.
It was my first sweat lodge. We were packed in tight, the roof inches from our skulls, crouched and huddled together on the dirt floor like too many Marines on a five-ton truck. Once we stepped inside, there was nowhere else to go.
Melina took us through several rounds of ceremony while he
r husband, the shaman, tended to the fire outside, chanting in some local tongue, occasionally opening the curtain to add more coals and then sealing us off again.
It was hotter than hell. We were a mess of sweat and earth, and each time I took a hand from the floor of the hut to wipe my face, I left grit like messy camo paint on my brow and cheeks. The last time I was this hot I was locked in a tiny sauna in a camouflage uniform, combat boots, and flak jacket, dog tags searing my breasts, sweat dripping down the crack in my rear end, as Bristol prepped me and my squad for close-combat drills in desert-like conditions. Back then I sucked it up like a proud champion. But here, after three rounds of sweating, I was starting to feel trapped. Discomfort was fast turning into panic.
Hugging my knees close to my chest, I shifted my butt in the three inches of wiggle room I had to either side. Hadn’t we learned to breathe deeply? I tried. Nothing was helping. I hated being a nuisance. I hated being weak.
“I can’t breathe.” I’m not sure anyone heard me.
Minutes later, my breaths had transformed into gasps.
“I. Can’t. Breathe.”
I heard feet shifting, clothing rustling. Melina wove her way through clumps of bodies around the coals, making her way to me.
“Lie down,” she said firmly.
There was no room to spread out. I surrendered on the ground, sideways, fetal. Something was starting to happen to my body, some mystical thing in which it was quite possible I was no longer in control, because I had started crying like an infant, and the crying was becoming hysterical. My friends sitting around the glowing coals were starting to worry. I knew this because there were murmurs of concern echoing from familiar voices within the walls of the lodge.
As my body regressed into a state of helplessness, I was aware of something happening in my brain. I knew I was here, but there were images coming to mind, a black-and-white film reel of my senseless battalion commander and the predatory lieutenant. I thought what the hell are they doing here, two fucking gringo military men, in this hut that was now coming down on top of me.
And then, with my face awash in wetness and my throat expelling sounds and sobs, I had the sense of my body softening. I felt it below the gasps and the tears, a small opening, forgiving them for what they should have known, forgiving them for not knowing at all. And this wave of forgiveness, the relief it brought not only that there was somewhere in the world I could let go of this hurt but that there must be something redeemable and possibly lovable in me after all, sent me into convulsions.
I thought this was it. I was going to die. Death seemed okay to me. I was no longer afraid. This didn’t last long.
Words came, between sobs.
“I see shadows.” My voice wasn’t even mine. It was an echo in the darkness. Something from long ago.
Melina was mumbling at me. In English. In Spanish. In something before them both. I could no longer hear her.
“They’re here. They’re going to hurt me.” Silhouettes, sharp-toothed and sharp-clawed, surrounded me. This could not be happening, and yet it was. If I ever needed a special-operations rescue, a high-speed extraction, it was now.
“They’re here! They’re here!”
Melina had rooted her legs deep into the ground, one on either side of me, and, squatting low like a fantastic four-legged warrior beast preparing for birth, let go a terrifying shriek channeled from someplace that was not of this earth or dimension. I had no choice but to submit. I let go completely, clutching the earth.
• • •
Hours later, time had stopped.
I was curled into a muddy ball on the floor, weeping softly. Two older women from my class, both mothers, were holding me. The rest of the group had left the lodge. The coals were no longer glowing. My shadows were gone. I felt spent. Lighter. Safe.
“Thank you.” Melina was talking to me. According to her, this ceremony was my rebirth, and through my journey I had helped release generations of people from their suffering. I was a stubborn agnostic, but if it meant leaving behind those scary-as-fuck demons, I was okay with Melina’s explanation. I avoided looking at mirrors for several days after that. I wasn’t sure what I would see.
My group and I didn’t speak about the event. Whatever happened south of the border remained there in the dirt.
• • •
In 2008, I was back in Brooklyn and deep in my yoga practice. I had started teaching yoga, first to men living with HIV and AIDS, and then to veterans. One afternoon, I received a thin envelope from the Department of Veterans Affairs. I made Greg open it.
VA had denied my disability claim, citing insufficient evidence.
VA’s no felt a lot like a betrayal. I took a few weeks to think about whether I had what it took to move forward. It turns out I had plenty to say. If a person like me, a former officer with all the resources I had access to, couldn’t get VA to work for me, how could I expect VA to work for folks too isolated, traumatized, broken, or broke to fight back?
This choice of mine to engage in activism became a matter of dharma, a kind of sacred duty. It was something I owed myself and others. Once I realized this, I stepped out of the shadows.
Eli and I were talking one day at my apartment about community while Shiva and Uma slept in sunbeams at our feet. There was no place for women veterans like us. Veteran dudes took up all the space, and could not imagine a world in which women played a leading role in organizing. We started brainstorming about gathering women veterans together and creating a safe and accepting environment for women of color, women of two spirits,III and others who’d been marginalized after coming home.
A few months later, while I was plowing through my VA claim and taking time to heal, Eli brought this gathering to fruition in California. Hosted by the Women of Color Resource Center, a diverse group of women veterans from around the country attended. The women conceived the acronym Service Women’s Action Network, SWAN, a word loaded with symbolism about second lives, including the marginalized duckling who in time came to discover his true identity and strength. It seemed like an apt metaphor for the experience of many women veterans.
When VA rejected my claim, I was raring to get involved, and with Eli’s blessing to do what I saw fit, took charge of the organization and ten thousand dollars in seed funding.
No one with my background—cultural, educational, political—had ever headed up a veterans’ organization, for men or women. The equality issues I wanted to bring to a national platform—opening combat assignments to women, ending sexual and domestic violence, improving women veterans health care (including reproductive health care) and benefits—were typically the domain of the political left. But the left wasn’t as experienced with the military, and when they attempted to support women in uniform, many of us who had served cringed at their misuse of military acronyms, phrases, and terminology.
I knew the left intimately. I had been immersed in leftist politics growing up; I’d lived with Zapatistas before joining the Marines, protested police brutality as a teenager, and voted more than once for Ralph Nader (much to the amusement of folks in uniform). Sure, the Marines had ignited my contempt for bigotry and my thirst for racial and gender justice. Brown, female, and queer, I was fundamentally different in a way that made powerful people uncomfortable. But as a Marine I’d also built bridges with people who were nothing like me, because I had to in order to assimilate and survive. The Marine Corps opened me to a world of people I’d never have otherwise known, many of them flag-waving, gun-toting, Bible-loving folks with genuine hearts of gold. I was a better person for it, and prepared to be a better activist because of it.
From its inception, I was concerned that SWAN was being influenced by civilian activists who had plenty of good intentions but didn’t understand the unique experiences of women in the military. Throughout my life, I’d seen people with less power have their gifts, narratives, and voices appropriated and exploited by more powerful people. Like many Brown folks from the global south,
I could smell colonial attitudes a mile away. I had a firm belief about the power of people to speak for themselves. And veterans sure as hell did not need to be spoken for.
Civilian activists in a post-9/11 world often came to us with mixed agendas that started with opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They painted women in the military in overly simplistic terms—as victims of a corrupt system that was responsible for massive war crimes. The military was all bad; men were toxic and uncontrollably violent. For most service women who’d experienced discrimination, assault, or harassment, the narrative was usually not so simple. How on earth was a civilian activist supposed to relate to a woman who had been abused by a fellow service member but was also loyal to the uniform? For activists who had never saluted a flag, or executed an order they disagreed with, the shared experience with service women was minimal. The problem was often one of authenticity.
There were also some practical issues to consider. Writing off the military in broad brushstrokes was doing nothing to win over mainstream flag-waving Americans, whom we needed on our side in order to reduce sexual violence in the ranks. And imposing antimilitary ideology on a relatively conservative group of women would alienate veterans who needed a supportive place to heal.
I avoided antiwar partnerships. I was clear about SWAN’s organizational intentions: to provide a safe space for all women veterans, and not to divide our community by party politics; who had served where, how, or when; or the foreign policy leanings of any particular administration. With few folks guiding me, and no road map for the issues we would be taking on, I was learning on the job, making mistakes, recalibrating, and moving forward.
• • •
Meanwhile, with the help of an attorney who provided free legal services to veterans, I decided to appeal my VA claim. The lawyer read through my stack of VA paperwork and declared, “It’s as if they didn’t even look at your file!”
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